An Atlas of the Church in Palestine

113 places, from Jerusalem and Gaza down to villages the book names once. Choose a period and the map redraws to the country that period had: Part I is a province, Part IV is an empire, and the same hill villages are in both.

Companion to The Church in Palestine, forthcoming from Wroot Press. See also the chronology and the texts.

Frame the wider world — Rome, Meroë, Baghdad — and not only Palestine

Search — old spellings too

113 places

The Gaza roadJerusalem → Eleutheropolis → GazaThe road of Acts 8, and the book's own through-line. Which of the roads down from Jerusalem Luke meant is disputed -- the southern one through the dry hills rather than the busy one through Lydda -- and the line drawn here takes that reading.
Fabri's contracted roadJerusalem → Hebron → Gaza → SinaiFelix Fabri's pilgrim party of 1483 contracted for the desert crossing at Gaza; the price, the camels and the escort are all in his account.
The flight to PellaJerusalem → PellaEusebius reports that the Jerusalem church left the city for Pella before the war of 66-70. The line is drawn because the book argues about it, not because the journey is documented.

The names

A place is listed under the name this book uses and searchable under every other name it has carried. That is not a courtesy to the reader; it is most of the work. Jifna is Jufna and Gophna, Taybeh is Taiyibeh and before that Ephraim, Ramallah is Ram-Allah in the Survey of Western Palestine, Beisan is Scythopolis and Beth Shean, Nablus is Neapolis and Shechem, and Jerusalem spent four centuries being called Aelia in every official document while the people who lived there went on calling it Jerusalem. A reader who cannot search the spelling in front of them has no companion at all.

What a pin is and is not

A pin is a coordinate, and a coordinate is a fact about where something is — not a drawing of it, and not a claim about what stood there. Where the site is identified and excavated the pin is on it. Where the identification is secure but the site is under a modern town, the pin is the town and the popup says so. Regions — the Negev, the Judaean desert — are pinned at their middle for want of anywhere better, and are marked in the second colour. Sites are annotated only where they are contested or where the ground itself is the argument; the rest carry their dates in the chronology and their story in the book.

The size of each pin

Pins are scaled by how often the book names the place, on a flattened scale. Jerusalem is named 482 times and a dozen villages once each; drawn to scale, the villages would not be visible, and the villages are the reason this exists.